Culture Differences

What is culture? To me, culture is a kind of regulations and acknowledgements, which are come from our last or elder generations. It represents the history of a country. I don`t know why, culture is acceptable though. The majority in their societies who are experiencing benefits, or they believe that benefits can be brought by their cultures in practice. These regulations and acknowledgements are becoming the newly generation`s options. These make up the main contents of culture. People will abandon parts of their culture only if they are proved to be wrong through objective reality. So culture has the ability of update as well. In a word, the features of culture are subjectivity and continuity. The best way of understanding a culture is to learn its language. As we known, language and culture have the closest relationship of one another. People learn a second language for experiencing exotic culture, acquiring professional knowledge or working abroad, etc. They may have difficulties when they are dealing with a second language. In fact, cultural shock would be another difficulty due to cultural differences.

I am from China. Generally speaking, Chinese culture and some of Asian cultures reflect the principles of collectivism. These kinds of culture prefer to focus on cooperation of every group member. Members are modest and respect each other. They never easily show colorful personalities in public. The advantages of collectivism are people may easily get along with; they won`t make their conflicts known to the public even though disagreement exists in a group. Compared with collectivism, American culture has a tendency towards individualism. American people have a strong sense of independent character, who pay much attention to the freedom which without external restriction. Under the culture of individualism, American writers use “I” frequently to express opinions or standpoints when discussing and writing essays. However, being affected by traditional collectivism, college students in China who are prefer to use “we” as the first person in essays.

Chinese culture teaches us how to avoid conflicts face to face, or to criticize a social phenomenon in public. We have to act in a circumlocutory way whatever we write or talk. We are sensitive about our reputation. It is the best way to keep harmonious relations with each other in China. Based on the cultural differences, people use metaphors to express ideas in different ways in these two languages. Chinese essays are more redundant. People write longer content because they need more than two sentences to describe an event while English is concise in order to avoid being repetition. As we know, writers don`t state his or her opinions immediately in my country. In this case, they usually reveal their thoughts through something similarly. For example, there was a famous author in Chinese history whose name is Lu Xun. He lived in the years of anti-Japanese war and wrote hundreds of literary works about anti-invasion when he was an editor of a newspaper office during that time. Lu Xun was so great that he used his pen to fight against Japanese invaders rather than a gun. He might have been sent into prison or got execution if he mentioned a word about anti-Japanese. You can never find a bit of war when you are reading his works because he was tricky enough to hide every sensitive word in his articles or poems. They are fiction, and he compared Japanese to everything he could image. See? Chinese culture is like a torch which is handed to us from our elder generation. This is a part of our culture; we have entered a brand new era though. We just learn what we have been taught. Besides, we have the habit of writing an historical epigram as a topic sentence or conclusion when they are writing in Chinese. It is a bad idea to do so because it becomes irrelevance in English.

I know little about comparison between Chinese and American cultures. China is one of the oldest countries in the world especially. And what`s more, I know even less about American culture due to I am a foreigner in the U.S. There is a Chinese saying, “take things as they come.” As a foreigner, the best way to overcome cultural shock is adapt myself to new surroundings. Study the new culture rather than reject it. Just like the reason of burrito and whopper can coexist, we should never expect our cultures can take the place of native one. How lucky I am! Only a small percentage of people in my country have a chance of experiencing two different cultures. And I believe that living abroad can enrich my experience of life.